MediaTek Unveils Kompanio 838: Performance and Battery Life for Mainstream Chromebooks

MediaTek has announced the launch of the new Kompanio 838 chip. MediaTek describes this SoC as targeted at the mainstream market, designed to power lightweight Chromebooks with a silent, fanless design. It offers exceptional battery life, delivering an excellent experience for high-performance computing, productivity enhancement, multimedia, web browsing, and gaming.

MediaTek claims that the Kompanio 838 achieves up to a 76% improvement in graphics performance, a 66% enhancement in CPU-based benchmarks, and a 60% increase in web-based benchmarks compared to the Kompanio 500 series. John Solomon, Vice President of Google ChromeOS, stated that the Kompanio 838 strikes a perfect balance between performance and power consumption, bringing critical innovations to Chromebooks and offering a powerful, affordable, and convenient computing experience to consumers worldwide.

The Kompanio 838 is manufactured using a 6nm process and features a “2+6” dual-cluster CPU architecture, with two performance-focused Arm Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.6 GHz and six energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz. The GPU is a five-core Arm-Mali G57 MC3. The integrated AI processor, NPU 650, boasts 4 TOPs of computing power, providing enhanced interactivity and higher-quality multimedia. It supports LPDDR4x-3733 and DDR4-3200 memory with a 64-bit bandwidth and eMMC 5.1 storage. The Imagiq 7 series ISP supports up to 16MP+16MP@30FPS.

The Kompanio 838 can support dual 4K displays, 4K@60Hz+4K@30Hz, and supports H.264 and HEVC (H.265) video encoding as well as H.264, HEVC, VP-9, and AV1 video decoding. Additionally, it supports Wi-Fi 6/6E with 2×2 antennas, achieving speeds up to 1.9Gbps, and offers PCIe x1, one USB 3.0, and two USB 2.0 external interfaces.